Monthly news – September
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Can’t believe it is September already – time certainly flies here.
Days go quick and they all seem
the same in some ways, but are filled really easily. The roosters don’t seem
to go to sleep, but are especially happy and loud when the sun is thinking
about getting up, which is about
A bit after 7 the alarm goes and while listening to the local announcements of what is happening today in both Niuean and English you slowly wake up and get ready to get up. In the bathroom, a quick inspection if there are any crawling animals on the floor or in the shower and then have a shower, which is really nice after Stuart cleaned it – thinking it was a not so good working white showerhead, it actually turns out to be a really good chrome showerhead.
Depending on what is on that day, Stuart drives to work or Ingrid drives Stuart to work and takes back the car and we get on with life. At
Stuart then goes back to work and
Ingrid goes back to whatever Ingrid does till
Depending on the day, after work we may go for a swim, play some tennis, we could play golf, but don’t seem to do that very much or just hang around the house. Cook some dinner or go out to eat and then it is time to go to bed and do it all over again. Stuart has at times compared it with the movie ground hog day.
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RALLY OF THE ROCK
The annual cycle event of
The race was over five stages all about 10 – 20 minutes through the bush with a drink a break in the middle. There were some good results and racing, everyone had a great time. Stuart was the result manager and Ingrid helped out as a marshal and was in the bush taking down the finish-times for some stages and was standing in the sun, rain and was eaten by mosquitoes all morning. |
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Very sophisticated result system! |
State of the art scoreboard. |
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BBQ at our house
Our idea for a nice BBQ with a few people turned out to be a great feast with more than 20 people and some dancing from Sarah and Amanda. We had been planning the BBQ for a Friday, but as Willie has to work on Friday, he suggested Wednesday and invited everyone at the hash and who-ever he met between Monday and Wednesday. During the week we were asked many times if it was true or not that we were hosting a BBQ, and so it turned into a bring your own everything party for who-ever wanted to come (included a BYO invitation). It was great, we had so much great food that our small fridge could not handle it - we didn’t have to cook for the rest of the week.
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Shopping
We were told before we came here
that you can’t buy anything and should take everything – this means that when
we left We have been making bread in our bread maker – even managed to make some croissants, they may not have looked the part, but they tasted very nice. If you have never tried to make croissant, like we have, you’ll never put butter on croissants ever again as so much butter goes in making them. We also have a yogurt maker, which makes a nice change for breakfast - we even have sachets that we can use to make Ice-cream.
All of this didn’t really seem necessary as – to a price- anything can be bought here. There is one larger supermarket (nothing really compared to the shops in other parts of the world), which is the main importer and then there are some smaller shops – they come to the bigger supermarket to buy their stuff!!! There is great butcher / delicatessen shop that has a lot of stuff (as with all shops the inventory varies depending on what was on the boat). They sell nice meat, cheese (a necessity for Ingrid), feta cheese, herbs, sun dried tomatoes and much more. |
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Handicraft
/ Weaving
There is a village market every
Tuesday and Friday, however when we get there at 8 AM most things are gone,
but ever once in a while you can buy some nice fresh vegetables, breakfast,
pies and the local handicraft. When you cut the leaves there are a few options, depending on the color you want your final piece to have. If you just leave the leaf to dry in the sun it will turn out brown and not very even in color. So if you want them whiter and more even of color you wash them in boiling water before you dry them – this is done in a big pot and depending on who you talk to some people even add washing power. If you want to get really fancy you can even paint the leaves black – to do this you have to first wash/boil the leaves, dry them and then do the whole process again, but put the husk of coconuts in the water when you boil it and they leave them in the water for a while and then dry them again. Very hard and long work. On good dry and sunny day it may only take one or two days to dry the leaves, but it rains here quite a lot and you can imagine it may take a week or more to get them really dry. The way they dry the leaves is something else too, you basically turn the leaf into a curl and hang it to dry from your windows or lying on the floor. |
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The process as described above is only the preparation and then the real hard work starts, the actual weaving. To do this, the leave is cut into little strings, which are raped around the strings made of the coconut leave middle. The women then make wonderful things with it, coasters, things you can put on the table under hot pots and pans, baskets in all shapes and sizes, bags again in different sizes, but also different designs and color combinations, and hats! The hats are worn in church and are the most spectaculars thing you have seen, can’t really describe it – I will try to take a picture of some of them. We haven’t tried this type of weaving yet, as the whole drying getting ready process is a bit daunting and we have no pandana tress in our garden, but we will try it at some stage. |
Dried pandana leaves |
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Hash
We actually missed one run early September as we were trying to learn how to weave and got shit for this all week. But since then we had some great hashes. The last one at Chris and Jeff’s house as they are leaving the island – Stuart got so drunk, he can’t even remember that we ate afterwards and I think the next evening he was still hangover (see what exercise does to me!!!! Stu©). This did teach him for the next hash-night though as it was the 350 run and promising to be a big one, so we ate before we went and we were fine the next day. It was a good night and everyone else seemed very drunk and suffered the next day (especially one local who may have had wood splinters in his old fella!!!! ).
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Clair and Isabel at weaving classes. |
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Whales
There aren’t a lot of whales around any more and therefore we haven’t seen any more to show you any more pictures that we took – I did copy a picture off Ken and Dave’s website http://www.pandaemonium.us/ (yachties that are mentioned in Stuart’s July story) just to show the magnificent animals. There was an English Lady here, Jill, who has made it her life’s quest to watch and swim with whales and dolphin. Ingrid went out on the boat with her and Jeff one morning, which was great just to be on the sea but unfortunately we didn’t see any whales up close.
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Showdays
There have been two more show days, Tuapa and Alofi North and a double ear piercing ceremony, but we forgot about the last one and never actually made it there. The show days were good though. We bought some local handicraft, Stuart entered the coconut husking competition – he did 1.5 almost 2 when the rest had there 6 coconuts finished, but he now has his own stick in the backyard and is practicing. |
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The general Saturday Alofi North show day was really good for the dancing and we got to see a lot of different dancing from around the pacific. |
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SOPAC Stuart you want to explain sopac.
Oh, so this is were I get to write something. If you haven’t guessed yet, Ingrid writes most of this stuff – she does a good job to make it from the 3rd person so as to be as clear as possible. SOPAC, it is the south pacific applied geosciences council.
i.e a bund of environmental, climate, geography, and geology scientists
getting together and talking about stuff ( I call it mutual admiration club).
Then they try to help Ok, sorry Ingrid – I know your mum is readying this. We really don’t drink that much, Ingrid hardly touches the stuff – but I make up for her ;-). Before I get band from the web page, I better let Ingrid continue.
On the Thursday evening the SOPACers wanted to have dinner
at the WashAway (the café of our neighbor Willie) and everyone got a job to
do at the café.
On Saturday night we attended to the final SOPAC dinner (well we gate-crashed it as we had no invitation), which was a great FiaFia (which means party in Niuean) and saw some great dancing from a local group that has traveled through the pacific in May, June, July. It is funny how everyone seems to know us and we still find it hard to recognize people and place them. We joined a table and got introduced to the people we didn’t know yet (or at least though we didn’t know) and they were all introduced as ministers from churches around the island. A little later however one of them asks Ingrid how our garden is!! She answered and got into a conversation, while both of us thought – how does he know about our vegetable garden. We don’t make the link until he said something about the watermelon seeds that Ingrid has planted with Joe (remember him from last month - he is the prisoner with the vegetable garden)! And then we recognize the man as the warden at the prison!!!! Stuart started asking about Joe being on his own at night – Stuart is really concerned about the big knife Joe carries around during the day-, but the warden re-assures him that he is locked up and there is another warden there right now. See also the prison continued bit below.
I (Ingrid) had a similar experience on my own a couple of days earlier when I was sitting at the wharf, watching the world go by and reading my book, and a man came and sat next to me. We have talked to him before as he is normally on the Tuesday and Friday market, well he isn’t actually in the market, he is just outside the building as apparently he doesn’t want to pay the small fee they charge for sitting in the market place. But anyway that wasn’t the story. Not really in a talking mood I said hallo and continued to read my book. The man persisted and we had the following conversation: Man: So how is your garden Ingrid: fine (while she though - how does he now) Man: Yes, it is growing well isn’t it Ingrid: Yes, but how do you know Man: I saw it, it looks very good Ingrid: You saw it? Man: Yes, you leave up in Fualahi, next to the village green. I saw the garden; I live not to far from Fualahi. Ingrid: Oh (and tried to read her book again- thinking what else does he knows) Man: Nice house Ingrid: Thank you (thinking – Hummm???) Man: And that is your car over there, nice car, a bit like mine – while pointing at our car parked not to far away Ingrid: yes, it is fine
At that stage one of the Dutch yachties came over and we
had a conversation in Dutch about what they can see when they rent a car the
next day. I left with them saying goodbye to the man and thinking – this
would really freak me out anywhere else I the world, but I guess on a small
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WiFi
Oh, it is my turn
again – yahoo. Stu© I finally got all my
equipment that I ordered from Oz. It took a few weeks and I had to pay Niuean
import duty, but it is great to have it. The normal phone dial up solution
only works sometimes and even less if it raining (water + copper cables =
problems) – the best connection speed is 28k, SLOW!, and costs .5c a min. Initially, I tried
installing the antenna on a small 5m pole we found earlier. I walked around
my front yard twisting and turning it trying to tune it in. It didn’t work,
but all the local kids and some parents had a great laugh at the silly
palangi. After a few days
of intense thinking while enjoying my daily movements (at least I now know,
me and coconut milk don’t get on too well now) I had a plan. On one Saturday
afternoon I went for a walk with my new big machete, found myself a big tall
straight tree, chopped it down, dragged it back to the house and repeated the
exercise. This time the local kids were a little worried about me (my sanity
that is), but I managed to get all 10m of the tree standing upright with the
antenna on top. It is lashed to a tree stump in the front yard and bends with
the wind.
To my surprise,
and the locals, it works. For the techies - I am beaming about 1.5 – 2km to a
WiFi Access Point attached to the uplink station – going over coconut trees,
a forest and a golf course. I have about 40% signal strength with is good, I
am using a 200mW high power long range veritech 2511 card (illegal in Oz, I
got it as export only) with a 14dBi directional vagi. So now I can
listen to ABC news radio, JJJ and download things really fast! It should pay
for itself by the time we leave; we were paying about $80 a month for the
telephone bill. I did have an email from the local ISP administrator but, he
had seen a huge increase in traffic – hummm well, I needed to download a new
movie didn’t I! Best Local comment regarding the installation – “Wow, are you ex-military or something. That pole is a tree, all bent and uneven. I thought palangi’s only build things with metal and perfectly straight.” |
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Veggiepatch The vegetable garden is great and it has grown amazingly. We did cheat a little bit though and got some plants from Joe at the prison. But our own little plants are growing although I can’t really see them growing big enough so that we can eat them, but we keep having faith. The plants from Jo are going very well, the tomato plants are growing to the heavens and started flowering so hopefully we will have tomatoes soon. The courgette/zuchinni plant has taken over the middle of our garden and the cucumber plant are grown so big that we have started planting them outside the vegetable garden – which wasn’t too big to start with and so we have dug up some more net to it.
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Prison – continued from last month
The whole prison thing is a bit weird, but the story seems to be: Joe is the prisoner, but used to be the warden until he shot the last prisoner, who apparently was a real piece of shit (Mrs Arkesteijn, I didn’t teach here this language stu©) and everyone was glad to be rid of him, however it is still not very good of Joe to shoot him. Joe used to be a cook on a boat traveling the world and has some great stories and good cooking hints. He is thinking of starting a TV cook show and teach the Niueans how to use vegetables in their daily food when he gets out of prison. I think he still has another 10 years to go and he is turning 60 this year, so not too sure about the plan, but there is still a lot of life left in him, so I wouldn’t be surprised. According to the new warden, the prisoners are locked up at night and are not allowed home on the weekend, but can get special compensation to leave for certain occasions like a funeral etc |
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Stu © - Ingrid didn’t really explain about the prison garden. It is next to the golf course, right behind the 7th green in fact. It has no walls, fences or bars on the building. Joe mostly walks around and tends to his large plot (100 x 100m), talking to anyone who drops by, practices his golf and keeps an eye out for chickens. I have had to, more than once, play it were it lies in the middle of Joe’s prized tomatoes – but if you have a chat with him, you can get a carrot to chew on for the rest of the round. |
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Yachtclub
As mentioned in the August letter, Ingrid became the
treasurer for the yachtclub and it turned out to be a bit more work then she
envisage, but all good fun. There was a great BBQ where 50+ people turned up
and a lot of people joined the yachtclub, which is good. Ingrid has been
working on the website for the yachtclub as well – www.niueisland.com and click on
yachting.
For a couple of days there was even a Dutch invasion from about 6 Dutch yachties on the island at the same time. It was strange to walk around the commercial center and suddenly hear, “Pas op, straks val je” (look out, you might fall). I looked over a there is a Dutch lady – Maureen and her boy. It was really good to talk some Dutch although; her husband Jean Marie’s Dutch was very hard to follow (originally a Frenchman). |
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Work – Stuart
Ground hog day, we are starting to setup some local LANs for printer sharing. My departments job is mostly hardware fixing and ordering new PC’s.
Strange story time again: When I arrived nobody had any real idea on how many PCs the government had or how many we had been fixing. So I started an asset search and a support log book. It has taken about a 1 month for the asset list to be preformed and an additional two months for it to be entered into a spreadsheet. Turns out we have 214 computers.
Then my boss asks us to also do a private PC asset list – i.e. all the other PC on the island. Not wishing to question – Why / How, the job was passed on to Simoe. I had a quick chat with her about it, and it turned out it was not strange to her at all, she even pulled out a list compiled two years ago! But how can we update it I asked, Simoe went on to mentally go through every house and village on the island and update the list from memory of what people had. I was impressed, I was going to ask why she didn’t do that for the government PC – but I though “ask a silly question……).
So we have 214 government computers and 54 non-government
computers exactly on the
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Work – Ingrid There is not a lot of news on the work-side. I am helping
out with the
I am supposed to start teaching Economics at the high school for their last term, but the term starts on Monday the 6th of October and it is now Friday the 3rd and I haven’t really heard anything yet, let alone have the keys to the room, books and what I need to teach. So more on at this topic next month.
I have also attended some meetings on the forum and trying
to get more accommodation on the island in time of the forum, but again
haven’t formally heard anything that they will employ me. Just doing it all
in the spirit of good will and hopefully they will pay me something. I have
actually did some work on the budget this last week as the New Zealand
bi-lateral talks are happening and Niue was supposed to present a budget for
these meetings to get some funding from New Zealand. It is nice to see that
it is still very easy for me to get some order in other people’s work and
make it presentable. It is funny how NZ wants to sent some of their people to
help
The meetings here are interesting. Depending on the importance
of the meeting, they will start with a prayer, then a long speech on how
import the thing is that we will be discussing; this may be done first in
Niue and then in English for my benefit. We then have the meeting, where
everyone that start speaking again says how important it all is and it all
ends with a long summary of the importance of the event, what we discussed
and another prayer. As we mentioned before they sure like the sound of their
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Language
As to the language, we are now the proud owners of a library book with everyday phrases in Niuean, but haven’t got far yet. I guess without anyone to teach us it is a bit pointless to try to pronounce the words correctly. Let me give you some examples: Good morning: Fakaalofa atu Goodbye: Fano a koe Please: Fakamolemole Fruit: Fualakau Bread: Falaoa tao |
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For a small and remote
Limes Coconut oil Taro Vanilla The satellite launch site The religious island state The submarine building port The sex lines numbers |
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